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California may be the solar Promised Land but Delaware is where those big green dreams go to die.

On Monday, Solar Trust of America became the latest solar developer to file for bankruptcy in Delaware federal court, putting into jeopardy photovoltaic power plant projects utilities were counting on to generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity – enough t0 light hundreds of thousands of homes at peak output. Among the projects was what would have been the world’s largest solar station, the Blythe Solar Power Project, a 1,000-megawatt power plant to be built in the Mojave Desert that had received a $2.1 billion federal loan guarantee offer.

Solar Trust’s parent company, German developer Solar Millennium, filed for bankruptcy in Germany in December and moved to sell its U.S pipeline of projects to a German photovoltaic power plant developer called Solarhybrid. Then late last month Solarhybrid itself sought bankruptcy protection, citing a cutback in German subsidies for solar energy.

According Solar Trust’s bankruptcy filings, the company has liabilities of $20 million and missed a $1 million rent payment on April 1 to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for the 7,025-acre Blythe site. Solar Trust this week faces deadlines to pay $30.9 million in security deposits to related to its right to connect its projects to the power grid.

NextEra Energy Resources (formerly FPL), the big Florida-based wind and solar developer, has expressed interest in some of the projects, according to an affidavit filed by Solar Trust president Edward Kleinschmidt on Monday.

The collapse of Solar Trust, based in Oakland, Calif., shows once again how vulnerable the U.S. solar industry is to upheavals in the global market and just how difficult it has become to get big solar projects built absent a deep-pocketed backer with the financial muscle of, say, a General Electric.

The Solar Trust saga began in 2009 when Solar Millennium created Solar Trust as a joint venture with German industrial giant Ferrostaal to build solar thermal power project in the American Southwest. Solar Trust was to develop power plants that deployed solar troughs, an older technology that uses long rows of parabolic mirrors to heat tubes of synthetic oil to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

Then the company’s Ridgecrest solar project was effectively scuttled due to its feared impact on the imperiled Mohave ground squirrel. (When I interviewed Solar Trust executive Rainer Aringhoff for a New York Times story in September 2009 he seem a bit bewildered and frustrated by California’s extensive environmental review of solar project.)

Nonetheless, the California Energy Commission approved two of Solar Trust’s big projects and the federal government offered a $2.1 billion loan guarantee for Blythe. But plunging prices for photovoltaic modules made Solar Trust’s trough technology increasingly uncompetitive and last August the company announced it would turn down the $2.1 billion loan guarantee so it could switch to solar panels.

Back in Germany, meanwhile, Solar Millennium faced intense competitive pressure as cheap Chinese solar panels flooded the market and the government moved to ratchet back the subsides that had created the German solar boom. When Solar Millennium filed for bankruptcy in December, it ceased to fund Solar Trust. The other joint venture partner, Ferrostaal, has not provided any cash to Solar Trust for the past two years, according to the bankruptcy filing, and the company is down to nine full-time employees.

Still, Solar Trust’s Blythe and 500-megawatt Palen project in California may prove attractive to a potential buyer, given that they are licensed and have much-sought transmission rights. Another sweetener: utility Southern California Edison has committed to $300 million in transmission upgrades to bring electricity from the desert projects deto the coast, Solar Trust said in its filing.